Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

Smith and the captain Arthur Richardson. Townsend completed the cricketer’s double in championship matches alone, the first Derbyshire cricketer to accomplish this feat. Copson batted for most of the season at No.11: indeed for most of his first-class career he was an unquestioned tailender. He did however manage one batting curiosity in his sixteenth match. This occurred at Taunton when he contributed fifteen runs to a tenth-wicket partnership of 47 with Harry Elliott, the Derbyshire wicket-keeper, in the county’s second innings. This survived for almost 72 years, rather freakishly perhaps, as the county’s highest tenth-wicket partnership against Somerset until May, 2004, when Mohammad Sheikh and Nick Walker scored 104 in a drawn match at Derby. Off the field, Bill returned to work for the Clay Cross Company, though not now, it would appear, underground as a miner. * * * * * In 1933 Bill Copson’s bowling advanced rapidly. The Press now reported his bowling as fast-medium, and his captain, with a range of quick bowlers under his control, seems to have taken to using him in short spells. He consolidated his position as a regular opening bowler, playing in twenty six of Derbyshire’s twenty eight match Championship programme and took ninety wickets at an average of 21.34. He started his second season fairly quietly and took five wickets in an innings only once in his first sixteen games. Things looked up a little after this rather lean spell and he finished the season more strongly. He had nine wickets in the return game with Sussex at Hove in late July and then had his first haul of seven wickets in an innings, seven for 62 off 28 overs, in the match against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham College ground in mid-August, where Derbyshire went down to an innings defeat. Wisden commented favourably on his performance this year saying that ‘nothing was more gratifying than the advance of Copson in his second season with the county’, adding that his ‘pace off the pitch provided an effective contrast to that of the slower bowlers.’ The Cricketer , in its summary of Derbyshire’s season, said he ‘makes pace off the ground’ and ‘in another year or two may well be in the front rank.’ Derbyshire finished sixth in the Starting in First-Class Cricket 19